Load Balancing Technique for Congestion Control Multipath Routing Protocol in MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that can communicate without a central controller or fixed infrastructure. Due to node mobility, designing a routing protocol to provide an efficient and suitable method to route the data with less energy consumption, packet drop and to prolong the network lifetime has become a challenging issue in MANETs. In MANETs, reducing energy consumption and packet loss involves congestion control and load balancing techniques. Thus, this paper introduces an efficient routing technique called the multipath load balancing technique for congestion control (MLBCC) in MANETs to efficiently balance the load among multiple paths by reducing the congestion. MLBCC introduces a congestion control mechanism and a load balancing mechanism during the data transmission process. The congestion control mechanism detects the congestion by using an arrival rate and an outgoing rate at a particular time interval T. The load balancing mechanism selects a gateway node by using the link cost and the path cost to efficiently distribute the load by selecting the most desirable paths. For an efficient flow of distribution, a node availability degree standard deviation parameter is introduced. Simulation results of MLBCC show the performance improvements in terms of the control overhead, packet delivery ratio, average delay and packet drop ratio in comparison with Fibonacci sequence multipath load balancing, stable backbone-based multipath routing protocol and ad hoc on demand multipath distance vector routing. In addition, the results show that MLBCC efficiently balances the load of the nodes in the network.